Thought: Vampires in High School.

Here’s something I don’t get. (And this is definitely something I’ve talked to some people about, so maybe this won’t be a surprise to some of you.) If you’re a vampire, and you’re going to live forever, why would you go to high school more than once?

The Twilight Saga is definitely a prime example of this, but I know that the Vampire Kisses series also had a vampire in high school. I can only imagine that the countless teen vampire books have a few vampires in high school. I liked high school and I wouldn’t want to be there for the rest of eternity. College–of which I have attended two–I would probably gladly attend for the rest of my life. Imagine all the graduate degrees and doctorates I could acquire! (Seriously, if they find a way to make me immortal sometimes in the next 5 years, I’m totally going with that plan.)

I know that YA fiction generally focuses on teens–those who are somewhere between the ages of (in my experience) 15 and 17. But I don’t believe it. No one wants to attend high school more than once.

There’s a market for books about college students. I’m going to get on that. Go forth and write.

Thought: Writer’s Block, Pt. 2

It ought to be noted, that I broke my writer’s block this past November. It took something like three years, but I did it. Finally.

I still firmly believe that writer’s block is not a writer being lazy, like some people seem to think. I don’t believe that it’s a facet of a writer’s imagination–that if they think they’re blocked, then they are. I do believe that it has something to do with motivation and, yes, inspiration. In my case, it seem to be tied to my emotions as well. I spent significant parts of 2008 and 2009 being seriously depressed, and I am sure that factored into my inability to write.

But in the end, all I really needed was the right motivation to get over it: jealousy. As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month. And it only took nine words from my boyfriend to get me going again: “I think I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.” To be utterly fair, I don’t think it was purely jealousy on my part. I think it was also fear–fear that I was somehow going to get left behind in the wake of his creativity and his determination. And also that I would somehow lose what made me Me. If he was the writer, then who was I?

Anyway, I am happy to announce that I have conquered the beast and lived.

My only problem now is what to write first! But oh, it’s nice to be thinking like a writer again.

Thought: Fantasy.

What separates the fantastical from the merely fictional? I was thinking about a comment that Ellen Kushner made when talking about her book Swordspoint. She said that went she wrote it she didn’t intend for it to be a fantasy novel, and that she wasn’t all that clear on why it was categorized as fantasy since there was no magic in it.

It took me some time to hit upon the answer to this. In fact, it wasn’t until my roommate and I started planning out a series of novels that, while they also didn’t contain any magic (nor did the world that they are set in), were clearly fantasy. It seems to me that there is this conception that for a book to be classified as a “fantasy novel” there has to be some sort of magical element in it.

I would like to propose that no, this is wrong.

Clearly if something does have magic in it, then it is fantasy. But not everything that doesn’t have that particular element to the story is simply going to be fictional. The dictionary in my computer (an application that is so incredibly useful) says, “the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable.” Fantasy is something that takes place in a reality that is not our own. (It now becomes clear why Alternate Histories are thrown in with fantasy. Also, for the record, I will say that my computer’s dictionary also has this to say in the entry about fantasy: “a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, esp. in a setting other than the real world.” As you might imagine, I don’t entirely agree, but I can’t change the thing.)

In my mind, the distinction is simple: “fantasy” is something that is set in a world that is imagined. It is in the very definition of the word “fantasy.” Fantasy is something that has to be imagined, because it simply is not real.

Thought: World Fantasy Convention

So, I am at World Fantasy Convention 2007 and I would attempt to write something about it or talk about it or even give a summary of what I am doing at it, but I am too busy to write everything down and too excited to do it justice.

Suffice to say that I have met many of my favorite authors and decided that, yeah, I’m in the right business. There’s nothing else I would rather be doing with my time, or with my life.

Thought: Marching Merrily On Backwards.

I’m reading the Branion series by Fiona Patton at the moment. The first book was on my shelf for several months, and I finally gave in. I needed something to read, and the 60-some odd books that I had (and still have) yet to read were sitting on my shelf glaring at me. I could just feel it. (I still can.) So, I picked up The Stone Prince.

It was lovely. That’s not the point of this post. Shortly before finishing the book, I went ahead and got my hands on the rest of the series. There were three other books, and though out of print (or simply widely unavailable), this is what abebooks.com is for. I finished the “first” book, and then started on the “second.”

The quotes are there because it took me all of two pages to realize that though The Painter Knight is supposed to be a sequel (it was written after The Stone Prince and I have always seen it called the sequel), it comes chronologically after the “first” book! And the “third” book comes chronologically before the “second.” Following along that concept, the “fourth” is even further back in Fiona Patton’s world’s history. (Understand that it took some fancy figuring to come to this conclusion, but what confirmed it was the list of kings (called Aristoks in this world) in the front of the “fourth” book.)

At first I was very confused, and a little bit annoyed. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to read what came before the book I had just enjoyed. I wanted to know what came next. Well, that passed. I mean, the writing of the second book (with no quotes to denote that it was written second) was just as good as the first, and I was perfectly happy with it as a book, just maybe not as a sequel.

But the more I thought about it, the more interesting it actually became, and the less annoyed I was about the prospects of reading these books. By the time the first books open there are some 800 years of history for this world that Fiona Patton has created. Which she obviously has a very clear picture of. And she manages to convey this in the book, I thought. There are mentions of previous Aristoks and how many of them there were, and wars that have been fought, and so on and so forth.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a review of the Branion series, after all, I’ve read one and only begun the next. What this post is about is the challenges that one must be faced with if one is going to write a series of books in a world that is rich with history, and one is going to make the books chronologically backwards to the order that one writes them. You would have to be very careful about how much information you divulged and be very careful to keep with your own continuity.

I’m thinking about this from the point of view of another writer and I am thinking of the sheer amount of information you would have to know about the world you were working with just to keep your own facts straight and prevent incontinuity. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of work and I would be somewhat impressed with someone who even tried. I would be very impressed if they succeeded.

That all said, I have no idea if Fiona Patton succeeds. I’m not far enough into the second book to make a call on that one. But I’m already a little impressed.

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